Tag Archives: d&d

The saga for Chapter 35 of the Obsidian Frontier campaign is online in the Griff Wiki. In this chapter, our heroes investigate the ruins of the Tfinnan Estate hoping to find some evidence of the final resting place of the Ghostbane Scrolls.

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A new consortium wishes to create a grand new library in the new city of Obsidian Bay. They hire our heroes, who’s first stop is the Tfinnan Estate, where they should find some clues to further artifacts. On their way they run into the Wyvern Empire who is attempting to capture a few of their namesakes.

Things take a turn when a familiar pack of gnolls catches up to the party, forcing the group to evade them only to come up against a band of mutated trolls. Read the full saga.

A humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Obsidian Bay. A massive blizzard has suffocated the unprepared frontier town in snow, killing dozens outright and threatening dozens more with death by exposure. Many of the city’s ramshackle buildings and patchwork tents have collapsed, leaving hundreds without homes.

Obsidian Bay’s heroes are banding together to find supplies, care for the wounded and homeless, and combat the threat of monstrous predators circling the town, but it is not enough. An influx of supplies — building materials, food, weapons — is needed or the town itself might falter.

To that end, prominent citizens in the fledgling city banded together to fund a voyage to Gryrax, the capital of the Principality of Ulek. Initiated by the gnome Burgell, the mission quickly gathered momentum as others in the city donated coin toward the expedition.

The Scorpion— a well-known cog and sometime privateer — has been secured to make the run to Gradsul. Its captain, Raris Armbruster, is promising a swift run down the coast, sea monsters and aquatic goblins be damned! Read the full saga.

While our first playtest campaign, Obsidian Frontier, is a traditional low-level sandbox game, The Heart of Darkness looks to really put 5e through its paces by leveling up the player characters after every session.

This one-session-per-game approach is meant to do in a few months what it would normally have taken years to accomplish: advance the PCs from 1st to 15th level. Our low-level experimentation in Obsidian Frontier has shown D&D 5e to be every bit as fast as it was billedto be … but we don’t know if that will hold up at higher levels.

At the same time we don’t want to just roll up 15th level characters and call it done. That would allow us to test those characters, but we’d lose the organic evolution of the characters that makes D&D so much fun. The Heart of Darkness solves that problem by rapidly accelerating character advancement. In someways it’s more work — we all have to advance our characters each week, and the DM never has a chance to adjust to the current power level — but it also allows us to kick the tires on 5e in ways that one-shot playtests simply can’t.

Like Obsidian Frontier, the new campaign takes place in the World of Greyhawk. This time though, it’s set in CY 650, a little more than 50 years after our original Blackrazor campaign. The idea is that this is a “legacy” campaign, one that inherits — but is not bound by — the history of our earlier campaign. It’s a stranger, more progressive Greyhawk with non-lawful good paladins, tiefling warlocks, dragonborn sorcerers, and dwarven wizards. It’s an approach that would have shocked and enraged our traditionalist selves back in 1999 … but it provides the maximum flexibility we need for testing all of 5e’s races and rules.

Chapters 1 and 2 has seen our heroes explore the Caverns of Quasqueton, home to the (allegedly) deceased adventurers Roghan the Fearless and Zelligar the Unknown (as featured in the B1 In Search of the Unknown).